Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Melanda - first impression

According to the amount of information available in the internet, it's one of the most obscure and hard to get role-playing games, from the past. I bought it over one year ago and yeah, had no time to even read it. Now I finally managed to sit down and skim through the rulebook. Here are the very first impressions about it:

Character creation rules are really simple and pretty intuitive. Direct inspiration for Fudge is obvious;

Playable races are divided into two sub-groups - old races and new breeds. Older ones are: Baladel (virtually dwarves), Lyradel (wood elves), Gisadel (umm, jungle elves? they say that they are similar to Lyradel so I guess so) and Wandel (amphibian race). New breeds are humans (Omenwedur) and halflings (Uridos). In fact, it's written that old races are more related to each other than to the younger races;

Booklet has 64 pages. Bestiary consists of 30 pages. Many generic mythical creatures, many animals and many unique thingies. Had no time to read though the list. No generic "fantasy" races such as orcs, goblins and shit;

There is a player guide, added to the rulebook. In fact, it's just a sheet of crappy cardboard-ish paper, printed on both sides. Or maybe not that crappy, considering the fact that rulebook, along with the guide, survived 35 years...

Combat system looks atrocious. It seems that is really easy to die or be horribly mutilated. Probably nearly unplayable without major tweaks.